Associated Incidents
A federal judge in Colorado is giving MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's attorneys a slap on the wrist for using AI to write a legal brief full of mistakes, made-up cases, and misrepresentations of the law.
On Monday, District Court Judge Nina Wang fined attorneys Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster $3,000 apiece, saying they had failed to meet their professional obligations when they outsourced their work to artificial intelligence.
Wang said a February brief filed by Lindell's legal team contained "nearly 30 defective citations," and an order filed by Wang said Lindell's team did not admit to using generative AI when pressed about the errors.
Kachouroff only admitted to using AI to write his brief when asked directly by the judge, according to her order. Legal ethics experts had previously called the fictitious citations in the brief "egregious."
Lindell lost the defamation lawsuit last month. A jury found Lindell and his company FrankSpeech LLC liable for defamatory statements made about a former executive of Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems.
Lindell and FrankSpeech were ordered to pay a combined $2.3 million in damages.
Lindell's defense did not present evidence that the 2020 election was rigged or that Dominion Voting Systems and its executive, Eric Coomer, had engaged in any criminal behavior related to the election, because they argued that it doesn't matter whether Lindell's election rigging theories were true or false – only that he believed them.
Lindell told 9NEWS he doesn't have the $2.3 million to pay Coomer, after testifying that he sank millions of his own money into backing his election rigging claims and that MyPillow is bankrupt, but he said he plans on appealing the case.